Linkerbation

David Harry has done it again. He has released a fantastic follow up to the New York Times best seller of 2008 in the category of SEO eBooks that I actually took the time to read all the way through, SEO Handbook 2008, in the soon to be the best eBook I’ve read so far in 2009, SEO Handbook, The Link Building Edition.

As with all things that come out of the Huomah research center David has thoroughly researched every detail of this book in an effort to provide the reader with the most relevant and up to date information possible. Best of all it is broken down in to bite sized elements that are easy to understand and implement.

The book starts with the basics by explaining what the various link profile elements, from the old standard of simple backlinks to more advanced theories of link velocity and progresses steadily through the basics of link building. Where the book really starts to shine is when we leave the Link Building 101 and start exploring link building in social media and link bait.

Great link bait is almost as rare as a great robot assassin, they just don’t happen all that often, but when they do, look out. David takes the time to break down various types of link bait and explains how you can target your link bait at a specific audience. It’s even more rare that link bait will cross genres, so it becomes very important to tailor your link worthy content at the audiece you want to attract.

Finally everything is all tied together in a lesson on keyword research. What good is all this knowledge if you end up missing your target? No good!! Even though this section comes last, in my opinion it may be the ost important part of the book. Keyword research will help set you on the proper path and David gives you the tools to do it right.

I tend to not recommend a lot of things. I’ve been held responsible for other people’s content and I would never recommend something that I would not be willing to put my name on myself. And David’s link building handbook is one of those things that I wish I had written. But since he already did it, and definitely better than I would have, I have no qualms in telling anyone getting started in link building, or people that want to round out their knowledge, buy this book!

One of the more common ways for you to get your name out there is guest blogging. It puts you in front of new readers, allows you to spread your knowledge, and may get you a few links in the process. But even if you find a great blog to post on, you may not always have the time to write the post yourself. So you might consider hiring a ghost writer to take care of that for you. And if that ghost writer also happens to own the blog that you are guest blogging on, where’s the harm in that?

While I won’t suggest that you go out and buy links or blog posts in an effort to boost your search rankings, you may find yourself with an opportunity to promote your website through guest blogging. It would be a shame to miss that opportunity just because you don’t have the time. But before you start paying someone to guest blog for you there are some things you may want to consider before you engage them, and by inference, things you may not want to do if you plan on using your blog or website as a marketing platform for others.

1. Is the blog focused?

One of the most common issues you will find when researching blogs is that so many simply don’t stay on topic. Let’s assume that you are releasing a great new 5 speed Action-Man rotary toothbrush and you are looking for clean teeth fanatics to tell about your new toothbrush. One possible candidate has an great site, myteetharewhite.com, and you want them to write a review. Stop. Look at the site. Not just the first page, click around, look several pages deep. Are there random posts about v1agra? colon blow? free credit reports? Maybe they have a link to Amatuer Asian Porn in their blogroll.

These are all indications that this person is less interested in developing a solid website about a specific topic than they are in making as much money as possible, regardless of the long term effects. In this case you may want to consider finding a new ghostwriter.

2. Is it part of an “SEO Contest”?

This one always confuses me. Basically someone started a blog, or changed an established blog, with the goal of winning some worthless SEO contest that proves nothing other than they can out rank a collection of even more worthless newbs all trying to prove to themselves that they have a clue. Let me say right now, if you are in one of those contests, you don’t have a clue and should learn how to ask, “Do you want fries with that?”. I’ve seen people trying to sell ghostwriting services with header logos and hundreds of blogroll links all focused on stupid SEO contests.

You won’t see it very often, but when you do, run, this blog is most likely damaged goods.

3. Excerpts or Snipettes

Unless it is a major blog with tons of traffic, I recommend skipping these blogs. The main reason is that any link that they may give you will be worthless. The link will rarely, if ever, see the home page, and in a few short posts the post will fall off the front page never to be seen again. Any opportunity to gain traffic from it will pass just as quickly.

4. Default Wordpress Install

This one just bugs me. How can you take someone seriously if they can’t be bothered to install a basic theme to personalize their blog? It shows a lack of professionalism and a work ethic that will most certainly translate in to a poorly written blog post.

5. Can’t Follow Simple Directions

When you are looking for help with a specific topic, there is little worse than people that can’t be bothered to read what you wrote. If they can’t follow simple directions early in the process, what makes you think they will follow them later?

Let’s take a hypothetical situation where I might be looking to guest blog. I put out feelers looking for blogs that discuss the intricate details of pan frying North American Condor eggs using nothing but a cast iron skillet, three matches and a magnifying glass. If you send me a proposal that says that you can get me listed in the blogroll of 72.3 vampire blogs, you can pretty much bet that I will be adding you to my ignore list and I will never see your messages again.

As always, I would never suggest that you buy something just for the links. But you might not want to miss an opportunity just because you don’t have a lot of time to spare.

Flickr is one of the major photo sharing websites for those of you living under a rock.. In the past people, many people, have suggested that you could get some easy links to your site by simply looking for high PR Flickr pages and then posting links to your website in the comments.. Personally, I can’t stand this type of comment spam, it ruins communities and can cause users to not share their photos.. I’m glad that they put in the nofollow tag to help cut down on this type of comment spam..

That said, there is still a way to get links from Flickr and Flicker users while not descending in to the dirty spammer mentality..

The first step is to find a picture that you can use on your website..

1. It can be anything, but something that is truly useful to you..
2. Check the copyright info. most will be All rights reserved but many will be available for commercial use through Creative Commons.
3. Follow the license and then contact the person that made the photo and let them know that you used it and appreciate the photo or video.
4. Wait for them to blog about you or link to your website to show that they are a ‘professional’ because a commercial website thought enough of it to use it.

That’s it.. Simple really.. Will everyone link to you, no.. But that’s not the point.. You got a great photo for free so that has it’s own value.. But the potential for a nice link that isn’t comment spam, or from a generic link directory is worth the effort..

Finally, to make life even easier for you, because we all know how lazy you are when it comes to link building, check out this plugin for Wordpress that lets you search flickr by keyword, look at thumbnails, and even add the photo to your post with the proper attributes..

Photodropper

I’ve been playing with directory links a lot lately.. There are so many of them out there, and they worked so well for so long, that I thought that they needed another look see.. So what did I see??

More of the things we already know.. There are good directories and there are bad directories.. But what stuck out was the difference in link recognition and what happened to the website I used for testing..

The setup:

• 4 new domains in similar niches.
• Nothing but directory submissions

The Process:

• site #1 was simply hammered out using digiXmas
• site #2 used digi but only submitted to directories with a toolbar pr of 2 or better
• site #3 was submitted to pr2 and better directories in digi and then a ’small’ sampling of pr1 and pr0 directories
• site #4 was submitted to only pr4 or better directories

The Results:

Site #1: as expected, 60 days later it’s just sort of sitting there.. It’s doing fine in MSN/Live, but almost nothing in Google or Yahoo.

Site #2: did better than #1 but still sat unnoticed for more than 30 days. It was picked up and indexed, but never moved.

Site #3: actually did the best. It popped out of the nowhere land of sub 500 in Google to top 100 in about 3 weeks.

Site #4: meh. Nothing significant to report. It lands somewhere between #2 and #3 for results. I think that a lot of this has to do with the limited number of links at that level of directory. Even with paid directories the numbers just aren’t there to support a website.

Obviously you will rarely build a site and do nothing but directory submissions for promotion, at least if you want to be even a little successful. But what I’m seeing here is that new websites getting tons of pr0 and pr1 links can actually slow down your acceptance, I hate to use the term trust, with the major search engines. You can get them, but they need to be in moderation with much better links.

Also, tools like digiXmas are great for banging out some quick links to help your site along, but like any tool you need to know when to stop using it.. A quick 1600 links may sound great, but if you hold back a bit and only do the top 600 to 700 you may find that you get better results.

And yes, I know that this is hardly scientific, but I’d bet $100 that’s more testing than 99% of the people claiming to be SEOs are doing.

We all “know” that links pointing to you “can’t” hurt you, or at least that’s what the major search engines want us all to “know”.. Just like they want everyone to know that buying links it bad.. Evil even..

I’m not terribly convinced that it is “evil”.. In some industries it’s almost a requirement for ranking.. I mean seriously, how many people freely drop a link to website selling things without getting something for it?? Maybe a discount, or a review product, or maybe a few bucks for their trouble.. And with everyone and his brother slapping nofollow attributes on links it’s even worse.. It’s made all those “natural” links worth even more money..

I know, I know, we all already know this..

But let’s take a look at the link buying process.. Not that I’m recommending it.. Or even suggesting that you do it for your site, but let’s look at several ways you could go about buying links..

1. You could go to one of these link selling websites like Text Link Ads.. You remember them, they are the guys that don’t even come up in the search results for their own name any more because Google has declared what they do “wrong”.. There service is kind of expensive since they have to share what you pay them with the people that actually own the sites.. But they do all, or most, of the work for you..

Whether Google has their netowrk sorted out or not is an issue that is up for debate..

2. You could outsource the link building to some individual that will go out and find the links for you.. Most likely this will be an Indian, or Pakastani, or more recently even a Chinese, link builder.. But you can bet that they won’t have your best interests at heart, just getting you the 30 or 50 links they said they would and moving on as fast as they can to the next guy.

Then you are stuck with a crapload of junk links pointing at your site, you know, the ones that the SEs say can’t hurt you..

3. You could hang out one of the forums that allows this type of thing to be done in public. But again, you have to watch out for the guys that don’t have your best interest at heart.. I’ve seen people’s websites used as examples of the work they do only to see the site in question get pushed down the SERPs as soon as Google sees the post..

4. You could find quality websites that you like, that are in your niche, and simply email them and ask them if they are willing to sell you a link.. Most will ignore you or tell you to go away.. But a few will be thrilled to have a few dollars sent their way for doing what they would have done anyway..

So, while I’m not suggesting that you go out and actually pay someone for links, because that would be wrong, if you decide that buying links is something that will help your website, be careful how you go about it.. You might find out that links pointing at you really can hurt your site..

Seems that the power of Matt goes pretty far. I had intended to write about adding solid backlinks in your Twitter profile, but Matt Cutts decided that he didn’t care for those links.. And, of course, the Twitter guys listened and killed them..

Which started the lovely Sugarrae of on another mini rant (I do so love to read her rants)..

@mattcutts *I* gave this twitter page content, *I* got this twitter page 1700 backlinks, why should *I* not benefit from it?

And I have to agree with her.. We build the content, we put up the links, we attract the followers that make the site popular, we should at the very least be allowed to get a decent link back to our main websites.. But Google would rather see the natural web destroyed with their use of the noFollow tag on everything..

See what happens when you point things out to Google everyone?? That’s what makes writing this blog such a challenge.. How much to share and how much to hold back while it is still useful??

First off, I’m not convinced that just any old edu link is of any more value than any other link. The main reason that edu links “appear” to have more juice than any other link is that edu tends to attract links without trying. So the extra juice is simply a side effect of all the links, not because of the domain extension.

That said here is an easy way to use Google to help you find those sites that might be interested in linking to you.

In the search field at Google.Com simply type this:

“powered by wordpress” MySuperKeyword site:.edu

That’s it. That search with return all wordpress blogs that sit on an edu TLD. All you need to do after that is find the sites that will allow you to comment and post something useful. I certainly don’t advocate spamming all those blogs, or cherry picking the ones supporting the dofollow movement (I like Greg Boser’s modified version of the DoFollow plugin), but if you have something useful to add, add it.

While we are on the subject of using Google to find a decent edu hosted wordpress blog to comment or post on, you can also do search like this:

“powered by phpbb” MySuperKeyword site:.edu

Remeber, good comments only, no spam!! I’m just sayin’

The big news this week in link building is the new automation tool for Pligg based websites from Syndk8.

Called AutoPligg, it is designed to make it easy to submit your stories to websites based on the Pligg social networking software. No more creating accounts manually and then submitting your stories to each one. You can build your own niche based network of pligg sites and automate the entire process. Or you can just use the approximately 5,000 pre installed pligg sites and just hammer away at all of them.

Here is a list of features from the website:

• High quality 1 way links to your website
• Automatically register for accounts. Even breaks CAPTCHAs!!
• Create UNLIMITED profiles and indentities
• Submit stories and comment to 1000’s of sites
• Automated pinging after each submission
• Stats to show succesful submissions
• Proxy support
• Increase your page ranking
• Tag friendly
• Flexible features
• FREE lifetime upgrades
• Access to the private forum
• Get indexed in less than 24 hours flat! (google)
• Get indexed in less than 48 hours flat! (yahoo)

All this for $189.00!

This really isn’t any different than using digiXMAS to do your link submissions. It takes the “work” out of sharing your content with others.

I know that a lot of people are going to be screaming about the “black hat” uses for this tool, but like any other tool, it’s not the tool, it’s how you use it. Sure, you could set it to autospam and hammer your story out to more than 3 million pligg based websites, or you could build niche specific lists and submit legitimate stories to the sites that actually want them.

I’d prefer to see you use it to make your niche specific submissions a little easier, but whether you do or not is entirely up to you.

For the record, I used to run a pligg based site but it was so heavily spammed that I took it down until the pligg developers get their act together and actually start considering some level of security and template stability.

photo credit: robstephaustralia

I’ve been reading a lot about how link directories are dead when it comes to building a link profile. For most of those India based build and stuff directories that may be the case, but for those that are managed, perform complete site reviews, and keep from linking to what are commonly considered junk websites, this most certainly isn’t the case.

Well managed directories can provide a solid link profile base from which to build a new website, or stabilize an older site. But how to choose who to submit to?

Honestly, it doesn’t really matter. As long as your link profile isn’t 100% link directories, then any “bad” directories that you may submit your site to will have zero benefit, at worst, according to Google. But they might just help a little bit. And the good directories that you’ve submitted to will give you the juice and the traffic that they give.

A directory link will never have the juice that the front page of CNN will give you, but they shouldn’t be ignored either. Especially for a new website just looking for some love.

On a side note, I dumped a massive category dump in here to get started. I’ll be thinning it back down as I have time to make the link portion of the site a bit more friendly.

I’ve been wanting to dive into more link building material and ideas lately and I couldn’t justify full 4 hours of sleep I get every night so it’s time to get serious about link building.

Linkerbation

You can blame Cali Lewis over at Geek Brief TV for the name. She made a comment about linkerbation in one of her podcasts and someone with no plans or, apparently talent, registered the .com but never bothered to do anything with it. Since I firmly believe that good content can be found no matter what the URL or TLD is, I grabbed the .net to create this comfy little spot of linky goodness.

The big directory up front, yes it’s empty at the moment, will be filled over time with sites that I actually look at and like. No random junk sites allowed. And the blog over here will be about me learning and sharing all sorts of link building goodness.

So if you have a good site submit it. Have a comment or suggestion for the blog, submit it (dofollow being installed in a few minutes). Don’t like what I have to say? Keep it to yourself, I am a delicate flounder after all and my feelings are hurt easily.